... here, where the gaze is stopped everywhere, the whole earth is designed so that the face turns upward and the gaze implores. Oh! I hate this world where we are reduced to God.

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

Old women even forget how to love their sons. The heart gets worn out, Monsieur.

maybe she had become tired of being the girlfriend of a condemned man. It also occured to me that maybe she was sick, or dead. These things happen. [...] Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. That seemed perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead.

But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.

Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.

There is always a certain hour of the day and of the night when a man’s courage is at its lowest ebb, and it was that hour only that he feared.